


Blood Sacrifice

by scribblesandscreeds



Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood, Death, F/M, Knifeplay, Mild Blood, Oneshot, Original work - Freeform, Penis In Vagina Sex, Vampire Sex, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-29 03:55:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19822018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblesandscreeds/pseuds/scribblesandscreeds
Summary: My mother cried when I was Chosen. Most of the time the mothers try to hide their tears when it is announced that it is their child who will be ritually slaughtered to appease the gods, but mine was so full of joy and pride that it spilled out of her eyes and down her face.I wondered if she would be proud of me for stepping into the breach, or ashamed that I wasn't doing it properly.In a world where vampires are revered as dark gods, sacrifices must be made. There are rituals and traditions going back generations to ensure the safety of the community. The ritual has gone wrong.





	Blood Sacrifice

**Author's Note:**

> This is not my normal fare, and it's actually pretty old. 
> 
> It's also the first time I've had the nerve to post even incidental smut here.

There has to be a sacrifice. 

When the moon is new and the sun has set, the Chosen one is prepared and escorted to the blood garden. There she is placed on the altar, blessed, and left. The escort detail withdraw the way they came, knowing that one of their six will have a month to finalise her training before it is her turn. A last month to live.  
They will enter from the far end of the garden. The doors at both ends open from the outside. They are locked, bolted, barred with beams larger than a man and we are told that it is enough to contain them. It's certainly enough if the sacrifice loses her nerve. Sometimes that happens. The escort shut the door on her pleas, and that night there will almost certainly be screaming. The musicians will have to play louder at the service. 

That rarely happens, though. A large part of the training is the meditation to keep the sacrifice calm and distant, so she barely feels the fear or the pain. She can't be drugged, they are very particular about that. It spoils the flavour. 

It is a great honour to be Chosen. The sacrifice saves the whole community. If we did not feed them, they would feed themselves. Entire towns have been laid waste before, with maybe a survivor or two to tell the tale. It is far better this way. For half a year you live like a queen, then in the final ceremony you might become a goddess. What are pain and death compared to that?

I wasn't nervous, any more than usual. It was my third escort service. The votive gown looked almost white in the starlight. It was just about the only thing we could see in the moonless darkness. I asked a priest once why it was yellow, and was told to hold my tongue and not ask stupid questions. It's not hard to guess if you're a woman and you've washed your own sheets, though. I mentioned it to one of the other girls and she argued that if that was the case it wouldn't be all one smooth colour, it would be patchy with individual stains. She didn't want to think that maybe it _is_ all one individual stain.

There is always a chill when you step into the garden which has little to do with the fact that it is open to the sky. All seven of us will die in here eventually, as will those who come after us, as did those who went before. 

Though she breathed hard and fast, the girl in the diaphanous star-bleached yellow was serene, gliding forward over the stones towards the altar as if she didn't have a care in the world.  
The first sign that something was wrong was seen only by me - the other girl flanking the sacrifice was looking straight ahead. I saw her jaw clench shut. That's not so unusual. You might bite down hard to still your chattering teeth.  
Then she stumbled, and my heart leapt for her, that something so petty and mundane should go wrong for her on her big night.  
Then she fell. The two girls in front of her slowed her fall, but didn't react in time to prevent it. She convulsed on the ground. We stared at her, at each other, not knowing what was happening or what to do.

I once asked what we would do if something went wrong with the ceremony.  
_It won't._  
_But what if it does?_  
_It won't. That is why you practice and train, so that it won't._

She started to gasp and heave for breath. If I had gone with my first instinct, perhaps I would have got out of there. But I wanted to believe that everything would still go to order, so I denied it.

“What's wrong?” one of the girls bringing up the rear asked. You're not supposed to speak in the blood garden, except to say the invocation. She was the newest of us. 

I crouched, still not grasping the situation, and tried to hold the sacrifice still. I caught the smell of her breath. Bitter, bitter almonds. Then she jerked one last time, and stopped moving. I wasn't a healer, but I had an idea of where to feel for a pulse. I didn't find one. Perhaps if I had stood before I spoke it would have been one of the others, but I didn't _think_.

“She's dead.” I whispered.

The same look of horror was on every face. A breath, then as one, the five of them bolted for the door. I scrambled after them, but I never had a chance. The doors slammed before I got to them, and though they moved under the weight of my body hitting them they didn't open enough. I heard the bolts, the beams, the locks, all out of order and fumbled and pounded my fists on the wood screaming

“It's not me! It's not my turn! I'm not _ready!_ ” 

Someone on the other side was sobbing hysterically, as if she was the one stuck in here. I kept hammering on the door and begging to be let out until it became clear that they had all left me. Cowards.

I turned back to the garden. I had been there long enough for my eyes to adjust. The dead girl glowed, but the stones were pale too. The walls were high, overhung with a cloister roof. Walls, pillars and roof were crumbling. I might have been able to climb them, but to what end? To be killed in the consequent slaughter? There has to be a sacrifice.

I stumbled to the centre. The sacrifice should at least try to give the illusion of willingness. But it wasn't my turn, it wasn't _fair_. I tried to make myself put on the gown. I just started to cry instead. My hands were shaking too much to strip her, and she was still _warm_.

“Why, you selfish bitch? You were going to die anyway!” They were my words, and they came out of my mouth, but I didn't recognise the voice. 

I don't know how she even got her hands on poison. Or why – it's not like she cheated them of their offering, she just robbed me of the rest of my life. I know it wasn't much but I still had four months left and she threw it away for me. They would now be a girl short. Someone would have to replace me. Or would they actually be replacing her, since she never got sacrificed? I hoped it wouldn't be anyone I knew. Not that I had all that many friends to be at risk in the first place.  
I had a sister, but she wouldn't be sacrificed, because she was married. They weren't in love or anything, she just didn't want to die. I can't really blame her for that. 

“I hope it hurt.” 

Maybe it was petty to wish that, but it's true. I hope the poison burnt through her with unstoppable agony. I hope it hurt more than the teeth and the bleeding that she escaped.

I heard pipes and drums strike up, and bit down on a new surge of tears. They were already trying to drown me out. I bit into my cheeks and tasted blood. There was going to be a lot more blood before dawn, which I realised I wasn't going to see, and bit harder. I mustn't cry.  
My heart pounded. How long would it even continue to beat? I had no way of knowing how long we had been there, the dead girl and I. Before I was Chosen the prospect of being alone with a dead person would have made me weep with fear. Now, she was nothing. What could she do to me? Nothing, and she never would. She had given up her chance for that.

There is always a possibility – a very remote possibility – that the sacrifice will be chosen to transcend mere mortality. It hadn't happened for a long time. I didn't know anyone who had known it to happen in their lifetime, even the eldest of the elders could only speak of it second hand.

The world swayed back and forth as I stood again, giving up on the idea of the gown. I should at least have been on the altar. I was making myself walk towards it – forcing each step out, one by one – when I heard the scrape of a beam being lifted from a door.

I didn't mean to run. I didn't mean to hide. 

I found myself pressed against a stone column down the side of the garden with no real memory of how I'd got there. The stone was cool and rough against my face, beneath my hands. I shut my eyes and chewed at nothing to hold my tears in. My knees shook, tempting me to sink down to the ground and curl up into the corner of floor and column, and hide until it all went away. If I did, I would never be able to stand again.

The second bar lifted. Bolts screeched and shot open. Keys rang like tiny, muffled bells and locks ratcheted.  
The hinges of the massive doors barely made a sound, only moaning softly as they opened fully. I only managed to hear them because I had stopped breathing. 

They came.  
Their footsteps weren't silent, as I had expected, and their robes rustled softly as they swept across the ground. But those were the only sounds.

I managed to turn my head so that my cheek was pressed to the worn granite instead of my forehead, and watched. I wasn't exactly hiding. I was by the side of the column, not behind it. The moment one of them looked over they would see me, huddled in the shadows.

They walked in a formation eerily like our own, though there was no-one in the centre. Four of them were once women, two men. They looked almost normal, but I felt the menace emanating from them. They weren't like normal people. Even from across the garden I could feel that they were fundamentally inhuman.  
They stopped short of the altar. It didn't seem to disturb them much that it was unoccupied, the manacles empty. The manacles aren't that tight, they're more decorative than functional. If you really tried to escape they wouldn't hold you for very long. We weren't supposed to know this, but one of the lay brothers whose job it was to clean the garden after the sacrifice once let slip that he'd seen scratch marks on the inside of the doors, and bloody tracks back to the altar. The manacles themselves had been brown with blood. I didn't see that particular brother again after that.

I had to reveal myself. It would go worse for me if they had to drag me out of hiding. It was hard though, so hard to even push myself away from the stone and stand unsupported. My legs trembled as I tried to force them to move, and they refused.

They had broken formation to go around the altar, towards the dead girl. I had to be there before they discovered that she had spoiled herself for them. For the sake of everyone I knew, they must not be cheated. They must not be provoked into reprisals.

I managed to push one foot forwards. I had one hand braced against the column, to stay upright in a world that had shrunk to that enclosed garden and swayed drunkenly. I fixed my eyes on the altar and crept another step forward. Only my fingertips stayed on the stone, my arm outstretched. My vision had closed down to a tight circle, filled with the stone altar.

That's probably why I didn't see him.

I was trying to take a third step when I felt a large, cool hand close around my upper arm. I turned to face him and knew that his name was Balthazar, that he alone had known that the rapid, shallow breathing they all heard come to an abrupt halt as they entered the garden did not come from the body in the votive gown, that he was immeasurably strong, and older than any person alive. 

He didn't say a word, just looked at the altar, and back to me. He wanted to know why I wasn't up there, ready to say the invocation. Why I was half hiding in the shadows.

“It wasn't supposed to be me.” I said through numb lips. It sounded stupid, it sounded pathetic, it sounded absurd. The gods don't care whose turn it is. There has to be a sacrifice, and I was the only one there.  
_I'm not ready. I don't want to. I'm scared. I don't want to bleed to death. I don't want to feel their teeth tear me open but there has to be a sacrifice and I'm the only one here._

My mother cried when I was Chosen. Most of the time the mothers try to hide their tears when it is announced that it is their child who will be ritually slaughtered to appease the gods, but mine was so full of joy and pride that it spilled out of her eyes and down her face. She hadn't been Chosen herself, thanks to my grandfather's lax control of her girlish desires when she was young. He had been glad to see her married, indeed, he'd insisted on it even though it wasn't all that certain that she'd actually lain with my father. 

The others were looking at the dead girl. One of them picked her up by the hair, buried his face in her neck and sniffed gustily. It was the only breath any of them had drawn.  
Perhaps it would be her, after all. She was wearing the votive gown, she was cleansed and perfumed, though the word that came to mind was not _perfumed_ but _spiced_. I wore the drab habit of the escort guard and stank of sweat and fear. She wouldn't say the words but half of them don't anyway, if they're too deep in the trance or not deep enough. Maybe it wouldn't matter that her heart wasn't pumping any more. It hadn't been still for all that long.

He recoiled from her scent and threw her back down to the ground. Until she landed she could almost have still been alive, limbs jerking, head bouncing off the stone.

They turned to me.

Though I knew it was a terrible breach of etiquette, I met Balthazar's eyes and felt my panic disappear. Maybe he glamoured me, maybe it was just that it was finally happening and I couldn't make up any more terrible fantasies of what was to come.

I felt calm. Detached. Tired. It would all be over soon.

He could have picked me up and carried me, or dragged me, or thrown me single-handedly to the centre of the garden but he let me walk under my own power. For that, I was more grateful than I can say. He led me gently to the others, his grip never loosening, not that it would have mattered if it had. The world was still spinning, and I was so weary. I leant my head against his arm as he guided me – his prize – to the glowing white altar. I barely came up to his shoulder.

My sister was married in a garden like this, with about as many individuals present. I won't ever forget how my mother looked when she admitted that it was done and consummated. She might as well have walked up to her and spat in her eye. My grandfather had arranged the wedding. My sister confided to me that he'd told her that years ago he'd decided that he would rather have a living daughter than the honour of breeding the sacrifice, and he wasn't sorry for doing it twice. After that I was barely allowed to leave the house, lest I too should become ineligible for the sacrifice. I was only allowed friends my own age or younger, of proven virtue, without brothers or close male friends of their own. There were precious few of them, and they were all insufferably pious.

There seemed to be some discussion going on, though I didn't hear a word of it. When they reached their conclusion, they turned expectantly to me. I caught the eye of one of the women, and was made aware that they had been deciding whether or not to accept me in lieu of the girl who had been prepared. There had been some suggestion that the premature death of the intended sacrifice was a great insult that had to be answered, with my death only the first of many. Another argument had been that I had, after all, been Chosen for the sacrifice and so should be acceptable. This was countered with the fact that I was clearly not fully prepared. The most compelling argument came in the form of _fuck it, let's eat._ They continued to stare at me.

The invocation. They were waiting for me to say it. I started to recite the words I had known since before I could read or write,

“I come before you, a willing sacrifice, to bleed for your sustenance-” Balthazar waved my words away - apparently he was now in charge. It was just as well, the rest of the speech had retreated from my mind and would not come forward. How many times had I recited it? How many mnemonics did I have to ensure that I didn't accidentally paraphrase the words? It didn't matter, it was gone. My mother would have been furious.

Well, the whole ceremony was a balls-up anyway. Saying a speech prettily wouldn't salvage it now. I wondered if my mother would be proud of me for stepping into the breach, or ashamed that I wasn't doing it properly.

To my surprise, Balthazar produced a knife. No priest had ever mentioned this, only the teeth. I stood still – not exactly petrified with fear, but co-operating – as he sliced the dark habit from my body. I made the mistake of looking away. Fear grabbed my heart with both hands, and I flinched. The point of the knife dug into my thigh. It was sudden enough that it barely hurt.  
They surged forwards to surround me, and I caught my first glimpse of Balthazar's teeth as he bared them at the others. They shuffled back reluctantly. They wouldn't be staying back for long.  
The habit fell around my ankles. My skin prickled in the cold night air, and I felt a sluggish warm trickle ooze lazily down my leg from where the knife had inadvertently stabbed me. Balthazar's fingers, barely warmer than the night, stroked up my thigh to gather that trickle up. His eyes bored into mine as he sucked the blood off his fingers, and for the first time since the Choosing it seemed possible to me that I might not die a virgin.

An unexpected – but not unpleasant, and not as unfamiliar as the priesthood and my mother would have liked – warmth started to glow between my legs.  
I should have felt ashamed, standing naked in front of six strangers - but then, gods weren't exactly people.

_Why is the sacrifice always female?_ The thought popped into my head, but I didn’t seem to have been the one who thought it. The tone was sharp, demanding. Annoyed.  
“The terms of the covenant call for maidens.” My voice sounded strange, too loud despite the fact that it was barely audible.  
_Virgins. Not maidens. Do your elders withhold the males? Are they deemed too valuable to give up? Are we not given your finest?_  
I didn’t know. It had always felt to me that boys were considered more useful than girls, more desirable, more worthy of attention and respect, but I couldn’t believe that the priesthood would be so suicidally stupid as to try to cheat the gods of their due.  
_Why is the sacrifice always female?_  
“Perhaps… it's because we already bleed.”

The point of the knife travelled up my abdomen, between my breasts, up to my throat. I closed my eyes in anticipation of the wounding.  
_You have to relax, or it will hurt more._ Or was it meant to be the other way round?  
The rough warmth of the blade slicing through my skin was bad, but not as bad as I'd feared. I bore it without flinching. A cool mouth closed over the cut almost immediately, so hardly a drop escaped to steam on my shoulder.

I opened my eyes again, but I was no longer looking through them. I saw myself as if from above, limp in Balthazar's arms. He drank first, and longest. He gripped me wherever was convenient to hold me up with my throat to his mouth. One of his arms braced my back, his fingers sunk into the skin of my neck. The other was between my legs. My eyes were open, glazed, staring eerily over his shoulder at nothing.  
He passed me to the next, one of the women. She wasn't as strong as him, and propped me up against the altar before pressing her mouth to my neck. It wasn't spouting blood, only pouring. He must have opened a relatively small vessel. Her hand, the one that was not holding my throat, also went between my thighs. She can't have drunk more than a mouthful before passing my body – me – on.

Floating as I was, somewhere above them all, I was only dimly aware of sensation in my body. The soreness of the open wound, which only really hurt when they exchanged places and there was no mouth to harvest the blood. The movement of their fingers, probing deeper and deeper into me in a way I didn't mind at all, though I had no idea why they were doing it.  
By the time they had all partaken of the offering, I was sprawled on the altar with all the grace and decorum of a drunken whore. I felt that I should, at least, make an attempt to close my legs and just like that I was looking out of my own eyes again.

To say that my heart pounded would be to credit it with far greater strength than it possessed. It fluttered. It hurt. So did my throat, both where it bled and where it was bruised from grasping fingertips. My own fingers, and my toes, tingled.  
I tried to move my legs, but each one must have weighed as much as a millstone. Trying made my heart batter harder at my ribs and hurt more.  
It occurred to me that I was dying. The fear came back, now not only clutching my heart but digging sharp claws into it as well.

Then Balthazar was there. He bent over me and I saw starlight glint off his head. Then my eyes found his, and I was filled with the same calm that I had been when he had stripped me.  
He stood between my legs and I found that I wanted to close them again, this time around him. Not a single muscle moved on his face, but I felt approval. If I had had the blood to spare I still might not have blushed.  
There was nothing but him under his robe. He didn't remove it, only swept it to the sides so that it draped over my knees. 

_That's what they were doing._ The thought lazed through my mind. As he and his companions had bled me, their thrusting fingers had stroked and rubbed to make my heart beat faster and get me wet and open before they drained me dry. They had been getting me ready for him.

He slid a hand under my hips, another behind my shoulders, and lifted me up. The world careened madly as my head flopped back, and I felt sick. The sacrifice isn't supposed to eat or drink on the night, but, well. I supposed that this was why. 

Even though I knew that both of his hands were behind me, it took me a moment to realise what it was that was pressed against my pelvis. I couldn't have said how much a person could bleed before they passed out, but I had certainly bled enough to be stupid. He had my blood in his veins, and it seemed to have all gone to one place. It was warmer than the rest of him, warm and hard with my blood.

_Well, it was inside me before. It's just going back in a different way._ This struck me as hilariously funny, and I actually giggled aloud. My head was cradled and lifted, so that Balthazar could look me in the eye. One of his fine, arched eyebrows was marginally higher than the other.

“Blood...” I tried to articulate the amusing thought, but only that one word came out. Nonetheless he smiled a little, as if he understood and appreciated the joke. Speaking had made me aware of how dry my mouth was. Despite the ceremonial mead I had had at the service, I felt like I hadn't had a drop to drink for days.  
I didn't get to think about that for long.

The head of his cock travelled down my slit and pressed firmly into me with a delicious inward friction that felt to me, in my naïvete, like it might go on forever. I may have made some embarrassing noises. My wandering, detached mind reflected that he must have had a great deal of practice to do it so smoothly, and without his hands. Again I felt his amusement and approval.

I wouldn't have resisted even if I could. Before my sister eloped and my mother locked me away I was well on my way to becoming ineligible for the sacrifice, with the aid of one of the boys in the village. If we'd had the opportunity to do much more than explore what lay between each other's legs with our hands, in dark corners and snatched moments, I would probably have ended up having to marry him.  
My mother definitely didn't know. He wouldn't have lived.  
Clueless though he was, he had done things with his fingers that had made me ache to fuck him, and Balthazar's companions were far from clueless. 

Before I was Chosen, I – along with all the girls my age - had heard dire warnings about what our first time would be like. We must try not to cry, when our husbands claimed us. There would be pain, we were told, and blood, and humiliation, but we must grit our teeth and get through it somehow.

It was nothing like that. There was pain, to be sure – my neck hurt. There was blood, but not down there. As for humiliation, I was the sacrifice. The priests were never quite clear about the details of what happened in the blood garden, so I hadn't known it was coming, but I was the gods' to dispose of as they liked. What did I have to be ashamed of?

He started to move inside me, and I wished I could feel more. My hands and feet were completely numb, and my face wasn't far off. I wasn't even entirely sure where my arms and legs were. Most annoyingly, my cunt(I could only imagine what my mother would have done if she'd known I knew that word) was losing sensitivity. Still. There are far worse ways to go than being fucked by a god, in his temple, on his altar.

_Warm so warm so sweet so wet_

I was freezing. Goosebumps rose and fell on my flesh like they didn't have the strength to stay. I shivered sporadically, completely out of control. It didn't seem to matter that there was a heavy velvet robe covering most of me. There was no warmth in it. Balthazar bent his head to my neck, which now needed some encouragement to bleed.  
A wave of fear washed over what was left of me. I didn't know for sure how godessship was bestowed – maybe even the priests didn't – but most of the rumours agreed that there had to be an exchange of blood for an ordinary girl to become one of them. Blood had only gone one way, from me to them.

Balthazar shifted his grip and, unsupported, my head fell back again. The other five were upside down in my hazy vision, but I could see that they were all panting, lips pulled back, teeth bared.  
Except – they weren't panting, exactly. They only looked like they were. I was the only one breathing, though I was doing it enough for all of us. My heart was still racing, but it was starting to lose that race. It was stumbling, missing beats.

_They don't want me. Why would they want me? I'm quarry. I'm not a hunter._

Iridia – whose name I knew the moment our eyes met – stood tense with the desire to leap forward and devour me, restrained only by her knowledge of what Balthazar would do to her if she did. She held my gaze.

_You may be. We will teach you, if you survive._ That was definitely not my thought. It was hers.

“I'm dying.” I tried to say, but my mouth was too dry. It was a strange realisation, and a distracting one. I would rather have liked to enjoy being deflowered.

_That's why he's fucking you, you silly girl._

In my dying state nothing made much sense to me, that least of all.

_Blood is not the only liquid in your body._

Fingers slid up the back of my neck again, tipping my head forwards. I felt cold air on my neck. I could hardly see Balthazar's face through the thick grey fog, but I understood that they were trying – had been trying for lifetimes – to complete their number. Of course, any child could have told you that there should have been seven gods and goddesses, and that it was foretold that one day a sacrificial virgin would rise, transformed, to take her place among them. What I hadn't known was that the wait wasn't deliberate. They weren't withholding the blessing to save it for the perfect sacrifice, the holiest, most pure, strongest of spirit, like I'd always been taught. 

They had tried to elevate every single one of us. Thirteen virgins a year, for over a century. All had failed. All had died, and stayed dead.

I might have closed my eyes, I might not. I could hear the rustle of the shifting velvet, the wet smacking of our meeting flesh. My rapid, shallow breathing. 

Pressure on my numb lips, then Balthazar's tongue sliding against mine so that he filled me at both ends. It was slick and rusty with blood. The taste was no worse than times when I had bitten my cheeks bloody, and why would it be?  
All I cared was that it was wet. 

I could barely feel my limbs any more, but I was aware of them being manipulated, my joints moved. There were more than two hands holding me, and another mouth on my neck. 

There wasn't enough air in all the world. My chest hiccuped and trembled as I tried to draw enough in, and failed.

The world was black.

I wasn't afraid any more.

I wasn't anything.


End file.
